


Lining on the Bubbles

by RyMagnatar



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Doomed Timeline, Gen, Gore, Horrorterrors - Freeform, on the meteor or something
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-02
Updated: 2012-10-02
Packaged: 2017-11-15 12:09:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/527157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RyMagnatar/pseuds/RyMagnatar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rose sees into a timeline where everything has ended, everything is falling apart, degenerating-- Even the single godtier alternate version of herself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lining on the Bubbles

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Most Sessions Fail](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/12050) by Binart- artist. 



****  
  
It is not quite what you expect.  
  
When you pull that little crystal ball from your sleeve and you smooth your hands over the ever familiar surface and you bend over it, look into it, it is not quite what you expect.  
  
True, you have seen many things. More than Dave has even, or at least worse than he has seen, even withstanding all the timelines he dropped into. Over the sudden, somewhat painful process of hardening yourself to the sights coiled in this little seer’s orb, you have seen enough to turn your stomach and enough to give you nightmares. Yet this....  
  
Perhaps because it was not about your friends or any of the trolls, but about you.Perhaps because the focus of this vision was not Noir or any other great and terrible evil out in space. Perhaps because it was not quite the horrorterrors you remember. Perhaps because it is you that you watch, you that you hear, you that you are witnessing, it is different.  
  
Perhaps because she, you from another timeline, turns and looks over her shoulder and she--  
  
You stare at the wall. It is grey. You look at the ceiling. Also grey. You look down at your hands. They are ash colored. Like wood after a long fire, turned silver and lighter than a breath. Carefully manicured nails, done by Kanaya. Your hands are slender. If you concentrate you can imagine the bones under the skin, the flesh on top of that, the veins that supply the blood, and the tendons that connect it all together.  
  
Then you close your eyes and you see--  
  
Loud, sudden noises startle you. You jump, twist around, looking around with wide eyes, your heart hammers hard in your chest and your breath is so ragged in your throat that you don’t recognize the sound. Kanaya looks at you in worry when you do this. Whoever made the noise apologizes guiltily. You stare at them, begin to see what you can’t help but see anymore, and that’s when Dave steps up.  
  
Quiet and sure he puts his hand briefly on your shoulder, your arm. He always steps in between you and the perpetrator. His face is pale and smooth like yours and the mirrors over his eyes reflect your frightened face back at you.  
  
One day he steps between you and Kanaya, who dropped a stack of her books sending them clattering to the floor. He steps up and this time he touches your cheek and you look at him. You look at you see him and you see his eyes and they are red like embers from his land, red like rubies, red like blood. Black surrounded by red surrounded by white and suddenly there’s all this screaming. This insane, wild screaming and you turn around to tell them to shut up, that your head is splitting open, that you can’t stand it, they need to be quiet and warm hands grab your face and pull you around and you’re looking at black shades, at the reflection in those shades and its a girl with blonde hair and an open mouth and she’s screaming and God that is you that is you screaming and you cover your mouth with your hands but the sound just keep coming out, pouring out over the useless flesh of your fingers like ink spilled from a quill pot, black and rich,  shiny and staining and  you’ll never get it off you’ll never get the black out, you’ll never be able to stop seeing her.  
  
The way she turned to look over her shoulder. The way her flesh had pulled back from her eye sockets, her cheeks. The black of her mouth, the dark red of blood on her lips, her chin, staining her clothing. She stares at you and her eyes are huge. Enormous black pupils with a thin line of purple surrounding them like the shimmering membrane of a bubble. She smiles.She smiles and her teeth are red and her tongue is missing and she laughs and it sounds like the bubbling of sauce, like that one time your mother made a cheese sauce and you watched it boil and boil and boil until it went dry and crusty because she had vanished and left you in charge to stirr it and-  
  
She lifts up her hands, wide, gesturing. All that’s left of them are tendons and meat. They’re dark, the muscle dried from exposure. You can’t see more than that, more than her hands, her face and the side of her body. What of her clothes you see you can’t remember because all that burns in your mind is her white-gold hair like yours held back with a hair band like yours with eyes like yours staring at you and staring at you and she’s beckoning, beckoning.....  
  
She was you and you were her and she was godtier and so are you.  
  
You saw the world around her but only because she wanted you to, because she turned her back on you and you saw the world. It was grey and it was breaking. You could see the coding of the game like it was some fucked up unfinished beta system with the programmers still working out the kinks. There were pieces of the world that had fallen out. The sky, the ground, everything. Three bodies were on the ground.  
  
You could recognize the corpses without even thinking about it. Even though the three from your timeline are in godtier, in different clothes, and these three, these three who were her-you’s friends, were in their regular clothes.They were folded together, three little bodies, three little children all in a row and she walked by them like she had seen them every day for years and yet as though their deaths were fresh to her. She nodded to each one, bent and touched their foot, the hem of their pants, or skirt, and her half gone fingers touched their closed lips one after another. To her they might as well be asleep, but to you they were dirty, caked in dried blood and you could see at least one bloody stump where an arm should have been. What churned your stomach was the fact that dirt clung to their clothes, skin and faces, as if they had been buried and dug back up.   
  
And then she was looking up and you were looking up and clear as the green sun you could see the black tendrils of horror terrors. You wanted to pull back then but your eyes were glued to the scene. You watched as she sobbed, as you sobbed, and her mouth fell open and blackness consumed her.  
  
No. She did not go grimdark as you had. No. She was not her own form covered in the black of Eldritch beasts.  
  
Her body rippled like the surface of a still lake in a heavy downpour. There were burbles, bubbles across her flesh that burst black like boiling ink in a pan, agitated from the heat deep inside. Her white skin, whatever was left of that, and red muscles darkened, seeped into black and her clothing parted along the seams. She began to rise. You began to rise. You rose and black was around you, within you and you were choking on it as you ascended into the reach of the terrors above you and the words-  
  
Their whisperings were so much clearer this time than any time as they reached out to her-you and they crooned “Dear one, dear Rose, welcome home. Welcome home little ecto-sister.” And blackness was lined with blood red like the lining of a bubble. Blackness was lined with sky blue and bright viridian and then it was lined with lilac as well. In a split second the blackness was colored and then it went dark as she joined them and-  
  
And she became-  
  
She became them.  
  
You became them. This torn body turned black, godtier all alone and the world, the game fell apart as her-you became the shadows and gathered with them.  
  
The recoil of the vision sent it far back in your mind. Farther back than any other, even though you still saw skin pulled back where it should never be. Far enough that you were apart from it, distant from it, but Dave’s eyes brought it all back.  
  
When the screaming has stopped, after a time in darkness, you wake and you’re not alone. Kanaya is asleep holding your hand as you lay on the bed. Dave is standing over her, over you. He isn’t smiling. He lifts his head, to show he sees that you’re awake.   
  
You don’t smile either.   
  
You just look at him.  
  
He steps up and sits down on the bed beside you. He doesn’t look at you. He keeps his hands folded tight. “You saw it, didn’t you.” You’re used to a little inflection, a little emotion in his voice. He’s grown more open these last few weeks, but the way his voice breaks in that simple sentence is more like the shattering of a window to let in cold air than the careful unwrapping of an emotional gift. He was never ready to talk about this, you realize. It was why he never showed that he knew.   
  
You open your mouth to speak but your voice is gone. Vanished away with all your screaming.   
  
“Yeah don’t try to talk,” he shakes his head, “I couldn’t talk after I remembered seeing it too.”  
  
You want to sit up. You’re weak. You’re so tired. You can’t stop seeing black lined in red and purple. He shakes his head again. “Don’t go looking in doomed timelines anymore. That’s where that happens, doomed timelines with only one godtier. I found it by accident. Found me, or what was left of me, right before...” He looks away. He remains silent for several minutes.  
  
You want to cry. You don’t know how to cry about this.  
  
Dave stays quiet but sits there with you.  
  
All you can think about is how those voices were so familiar before. So familiar. And all this time....  
  
You were talking to yourself. 

**Author's Note:**

> Beta'd by my lovely new Beta, Sarah~ Thank you again so much

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The Problem With Sprites](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3388790) by [GemmaRose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GemmaRose/pseuds/GemmaRose)




End file.
